Transfiguration coloring

Epiphany colouring page

The adult version of the Epiphany

The adult version of Matthew’s nativity moves quickly from the glad moment of the adoration and gifts of the magi to a darker, more ambivalent world of political intrigue, deception, and fear-induced violence. (There’s a reason we read Luke on Christmas Eve!) But if Matthew’s account is more sober, it is also realistic. We live in a world riddled by fear, a world of devastating super-storms and elementary school massacres, a world where innocents die everyday to preventable illness and hunger. In Matthew’s story of the visit of the magi – and the subsequent slaughter of the innocents in the verses to come – Matthew renders an accurate if also difficult picture of the world.

And that is what is at the heart of Matthew’s darker, more adult-oriented story of Jesus’ birth: the promise that is precisely this world that God came to, this people so mastered by fear that we often do the unthinkable to each other and ourselves that God loves, this gaping need that we have and bear that God remedies. Jesus isEmmanuel, God with us, the living, breathing, and vulnerable promise that God chose to come live and die for us, as we are, so that in Christ’s resurrection we, too might experience newness of life.

As Denise Levertov writes in her poem “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”:
It’s when we face for a momentthe worst our kind can do, and shudder to knowthe taint in our own selves, that awecracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart.

 

http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1509